“The Seesaw ” – Uche Nduka

“The Seesaw ” – Uche Nduka

The bombing of those little girls in Alabama demands
perpetual remembrance(September 15,1963).

Whatever happens,don’t get to the point of feeling nothing.

What has peace got to do with cops in riot gear.

A piggy bank that connects itself to a bathing trunk.

Battered remains of a U-haul.

A crumpled Hockey Practice a hint of Disney.

As it slips in and out of your lips lachrymal graffiti.

The solution to a din is another din.

What transpires when a marriage blows up in your
face & only the house shared remains.

Skinny meanie let me tell you about wandering minarets.

Didn’t shoot him a cross look. Kicked his way to the top.
A nice guy wrapped in flags.

The scream may be fake but the pain is real.

The hair spa & playpen stay overloaded.

Effects pedal Sunwimp Outtakes reel.

See which way the rainbow turns bombing a marathon
is no solution.

The tech nerds the crumpled bills in a grocery store
adeptship of the auto-erotic.

Get your heart out of your throat lose your head.

To a confetti throwing I remain uncynical. (Written on
a laptop borrowed from a friend in Paris.) Like
driving around in a convertible with doo-wop men.

Maids of the gale they’re always adding gills & toffee.

The X-chromosome while the Judgement Day.

A testing ground for the pluck of survivalist lifestyle. That’s
what appeals to the President about Drones.

Bleeding guitar over margaritas.

To throw a lamp into a basement to hurl a basement
into the sky.

Discomfort is pithy. All by yourself- If you didn’t.
It was a grimshore.

& the mountain dribbles around the kitchen garbage.

Fattening your sound wrapple wrapple wrapple in a thimble.

Light your way with silliness the dervish the brass monkeys. I’m
going after what the city lights are hiding. Kimchi maven
she hints it’s rad & all that.

Around these mills the rain is always in love. How come you
told me never to fall in love.

I am the aging rockscape. Grass & furnace. Swept up in hibiscuses. Stir up the archive or else it will go sour. A car coat on a bedhead. A wah wah pedal. A telecaster. Confusion is our salvation. Desire & wrinkle the belly is not a symbol. The mother’s house: shadows in the bathroom. The big break tends to sprawl. Joy stumped its toe on the cut stone of partition. I haven’t come to know you in vain. To write is to crash into fountainheads. To adore heteroglossic crevices. A deep book is a teething engine. Trained by tulips from the other side of the dance. The rift being there. Being the craft. Its cargo & stillness. Now comes the acknowledgement of miracles. The strictness of stupefaction. Jeopardy’s juvenility. Arches dreaming of nipples. I neither seek peace nor perdition. Black syrup & artificial sweeteners died for. No brightness forewarned us. No barrier between agony & frontal nudity. The full play of intimacy. But you don’t know anything about terra-cotta. The moment for savoring an antipasto. To not speak of the underside of being sugar high. Your business with loose bowels. Couture & the fortitude of monsoons. Can’t call him the pillager of turbans. Consider self-effacement. Click. Consider wordprints. Click. Until later, cut grass; rubber bands. The premise is not innocence. Avid pillager? Craze for bounty. Craze for booty. It turns out you’ve got to keep traveling towards your birthrights. This too is a research. Don’t fight against the trio just because they’re on the wrong bus. Caprice of morning. Daylight in a sieve.

Around an anagram
every wound is a loop.
Her spasm instructs her
about a consciousness
greater than fate-
scrub string train
the heat towards
each other
into slices
in the middle of a room
short hand
same music
body frame same act
evolving genesis
off to the side
man woman pickle.

§

Uche Nduka is a Nigerian-American poet, essayist, collagist and dancer. He is the author of ten volumes of poems of which the most recent are If Only The Night, eel on reef, Tracers, Ijele, Nine East. Some of his poems have been translated into German, Dutch, French, Serbo-Croatian, Romanian, Italian, Spanish, Arabic, and Finnish. He presently lives in New York City and teaches at CUNY-Queens College.